HOW WE DO NETWORK MARKETING TO GET WORD-OF-MOUTH QUALITY REFERRALS

In this episode of local marketing podcast, we will help twin city business owners with creative ways to grow their business. We will talk about growing of referral network. Referral network such as BNI and NIGAM. They are group of 10 to 30 business owners within a region. All chapters over south metro of the twin city, we are really handling the financial and business services sphere. Being only the website marketing and event sort of individual within that sphere, we are looking for creativity to grow that chapter because if I grow that chapter, I will have a lot more possibility open up.

[00:48]

Even if I do website, I can bring another individual that does advertising or the response or sales training within that sphere. Great. Now, we all know people within our own network that we can pass leads and flows around. I am going to use the next 9 minutes to talk about how you can grow your referral network. If you are an individual this may and may not apply to you, but you are able to start one you can do this for free over at madeups.com, those are very excellent. I have seen people start up a business just by posting, communicating and putting people together. But if you are member of BNI chapter or any sort of marketing or madeups group that meet regularly when you see the same face that you trust, high quality ethics, then we you will be able to pass business around because you are together in that chapter and that brings more business. We are going to talk about creative way to grow.

[02:00]

It has been proved achievable and returns that after an hour or two, you can bring in one or two members. Let me tell you about myself quickly and what we do. My name is Jake Goos-Kuehn, I am the marketing director Web Strategy Viking, a small agency. I do marketing for local businesses and a madeup group is not much different. It boils down to having people find you, having people finding the networking, having a page and how to get people sign up to get more information and making the networking event appealing for them. If you don’t show up, you might lose out in business. There could be potential jobs or business enquiries they could get by showing up. They can’t afford not to miss things like that. What I have seen is that it boils down to having people show up for specific offer and that if it is compelling enough for them, they will take an action. That strategy is no difference to grow a referral network or to grow your chapter or attract people to join your madeup page.

[03:31]

There are 3 achievable tips that will help you grow your chapter. First, you need to do is to create a madeup startup page. So many units, so many chapters just build one up. This will take you 5 minutes depending on the information or how compelling you will need, madeups account page are very dear for them. They don’t care about the service you have to offer for them, you are only joining the network, so they grow. They are in it, so they get a lot of money, you are getting a lot of money as a consequences of them wanting you to have them help you, that’s a sort of politics. A madeups account page needs just a title, time, a picture and some sort of texting. What I find from my chapter is that when I set this up not only did, I just make up a madeups account page but when I personally advertise that page, we had one person shop every two weeks to 3 people showing up every week with just an extra hour of time to advertise that number of page directly.

[04:42]

What I mean by that is go to Craigslist, the achievable tip is to go to spaces outside of your comfort zone and advertise as it is your own business, advertise on Facebook to your circle, you can put up a flyer. The reason why I said that is that a lot of people see BNI as a public good like “I don’t own it, I don’t own the chapter, I don’t own the members there, I can’t control them so why will I spend my time and resources on that”. “Why will I spend 5 dollars a day as a growth coordinator for my BNI chapter that won’t pay and doesn’t understand the value of spending 35 dollars a week for growing a chapter, why will take out of my pocket to spend on Craigslist”. You want to grow your business, join our network in advance for free get a cup of coffee and get some sort of business court and meal. Why will I take a time to do that? The reason for that is that you might not have a lot of people in your sphere or in your chapter or in your organization. For me about 50 percent of the people in my chapter are within my real estate. There a marketer, mortgager, folks that help get some loan, credit in home insurance. All this people help on passing referral because they all work in the same professions and their customers all have the same needs. Oh, I need an insurance, I need to get a home I know someone that can get you one at a good rate. I also know someone that can provide you a home insurance and things like that. But if there is no one within my sphere because I do website and google on my sphere and I see I see that I have a website and I don’t know how to grow it, can I give the work to you then I will say “yes” because I specialize in that helping people grow their website just like this podcast.

[06:56]

Another point to why you would want to spend your time to grow your chapter is that if you have actively growing your sphere, you are not taking a selfish approach. You are bringing more visitor, you are providing value to everyone but if it is within your sphere don’t see it as bringing competition against yourself, but you are opening up much opportunities or much higher margin of opportunities.

[07:24]

If you are leaving out people within your sphere, people that I am interested in working with or the same people that will value sales training so I might talk to a sale trainer and say “join my chapter we have people that don’t care to necessary run google ads they just want to learn how to do coold calling better can I refer them to you?”, then you say “yes everyone in my chapter need someone like that they might enjoy it”, I can pass you that folks but that is unfair because more or less you will get pretty high rate because they know that in this sphere we are similar. The first thing is to make up a madeup.com startup page which you can do in 5 mins for free and the next one is to actively promote that page to people specifically within your sphere, not really in the same industry but people that are related.

[08:29]

There are five spheres that we going to talk about. Health and wellness that is another sphere, this are your chiropractors, massage, dental specialist, gym owner, surgeon, someone selling nutritional product that covers marketing an event. These are folks that print promotional items, T-shirts, embroidery maybe they do sales training, they make website, maybe they do the google or they do Facebook or run social media network or social media management things like that. These are your fun event marketing sort of promotions.

[09:13]

Another one is your real estate those that are based within the home, your interior decorator, consultant mortgagers, those that are building homes, these are contractor, they need site plumbers and other everyone within the home repair sphere. The two last spheres are your financial sphere; mortgager will be given a business loan which might be linked with the last sphere which is business services, something like bookkeeping, lawyer, insurance can run the same thing as financial services, but financial services could be like a private equity. Business services as the fifth sphere is just a way to help operate a business. Everyone knows a good CPA, invite them to your chapter.

This podcast is a regular podcast and comes with a unique set of content is exclusive only to the podcast with every single post that comes out, there is a complementary and unique blog post that get published on webstrategyviking.com website. If you are interested in learning more please follow, if you are trying to read a free post that tell you everything, check out the blog field on either Facebook or LinkedIn or on our website at webstrategyviking.com. Let me know if you try this out, let me know what does and doesn’t work. I guaranty you that if you try a madeups.com page and post it on Craigslist, in seven days you will be getting a lot of people flipping into your business. I will be talking later how to get specific people to get into your chapter. Thank you so much for listening. Bye.